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Keynote summary: The power of pessimism

What happens when a user research session goes wrong – and what could be done to prevent such a downward spiral into research hell?

The research team at Redbubble has come up with a fantastic activity to help understand what can go wrong so you can plan and discuss how to prevent the issues that unfold during the activity.

We won’t tell you too much about the details of the activity in case you are planning on running the session with your team. If you’re in a small group, each person plays a role (researcher, assessor, designer, stakeholder and participant) but at camp, the audience were the assessors and we had some fantastic volunteers acting as the different roles.

Before kicking off the activity, Jo Lumsden and Emily Murray from the Redbubble research team gave us a bit of an intro and THEN quizzed us on our research crimes. With over 300 people in the room, almost everyone had committed at least 1 crime!